


don't go down to the woods today

by kimaracretak



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Ahch-To, Alternate Universe, Angst, Dreams, F/F, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Grey Jedi Rey, landscapes that want to eat you, uneven temporalities
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: It is said that in the Feywild, time passes differently than it does in the natural world. In some areas of the plane, time virtually stands still, basking in eternal summer or frozen in endless winter. After spending only a few days in the Feywild, a mortal might return to his home in the world to find that everyone he knew perished long ago.—Heroes of the Feywild, p. 6Seven ways in which Ben might have joined Rey's search for Luke, and seven ways in which time doesn't move quite right on Ahch-To.





	1. [i.] days become years

**Author's Note:**

> If you go down to the woods today you're in for a big surprise  
> The orchestra is coming to play before your very eyes.  
> And everything you've ever been is in the show tonight.  
> Wrapped up in your very own symphony.
> 
> — 'The Ghost Moon Orchestra', Mostly Autumn
> 
> Full disclosure, although Amilyn and Leia are alive and together in all of these vignettes, the extent to which they're _present_ rather than referenced will vary from chapter to chapter.

She can feel the Force eddying around her, the presence of others unbearably more familiar than they should feel.

There's Leia, wrapped always — _always_? the word prickles uncomfortably against the back of her skull — these days in a sort of soft purple that Rey's learnt means _Vice-Admiral Holdo_. There's Luke, an aching raw wound of something impulsive that hasn't learned how to stop crying.

Others, rising faster and faster, crowding at her mind until the thin grey light connecting her to Ben is barely visible.

"Why are we stopping?" he asks, and it's not until she looks down that Rey realises she has indeed stopped. Is, in fact, sat on the grass, watching the green blur overwhelmingly at the corners of her vision like tears.

Rey bites down a first, instinctive, _why do you care_ — because the thing inside him that is Ben will always care despite her discomfort — and instead hesitantly opens the bond a little wider.

"Do you feel it?" she asks, more desperately than she had wanted to. "Something's ..."

 _Wrong_ , she wants to say, but she doesn't really know enough about the Force to say for sure. Just the drumbeat somewhere below her heart whispering _leave, leave, leave, before it's too late_.

She doesn't expect him to smile at her. "You're learning," he says, with that same unsettling awe that always clings to him whenever he looks at her.

 _Force_ , she wishes he was easier to push away.

"Learning what?"

"To feel." He reaches down, hand hovering just above her cheek, and against her better judgment she tilts her head just enough that his glove brushes against her skin. "To see." Her cheek burns at his touch, bright enough that she shuts her eyes against it and in the black catches a glimpse of a younger Leia. "To know." Cold pierces her chest and her eyes fly open with a gasp.

"Fuck, Ben, what is this place?"

His smile is sad now as she scrambles back away from him on her hands and knees, heedless of the rocks scraping at her palms.

"We don't need long, you and I." He won't meet her eyes, instead tips his head back to look up at the sky. Twilight is descending, even though they had landed shortly after sunrise and Rey is sure they can't have been walking more than a few hours. "But out there? Time isn't going to change anything, but it will make it easier to come back."

The fear rises in her throat as she tries to piece together his words, the Force, and what she knows shouldn't be possible. "I promised Leia — I promised your _mother_ —"

_I promised I would come back. I promised I would bring you back._

Now he does look at her, and for once she sees no condescension mixed in with the pity. "She knows," he says simply.

Rey shakes her head, uncomprehending. "But she sent ..." _Why would she send me away for so long?_

"She's good at that," he says with surprisingly little malice. "Think, Rey. Think about how we're connected. Think about how the Force connects everyone ... even her and Luke."

 _A year_ , Rey thinks numbly. _I'll have left her for at least a year_.

"It's getting dark," she says, mustering all of the lessons she learned on Jakku to speak rather than scream.

His hand is still on her cheek. Rey brushes it aside as she gets up, continues heading down the gentle slope of the hills towards the seaside rocks that must have some sort of cave where they can shelter for the night.

"Careful," he murmurs from somewhere behind her, and she can't tell if he's spoken aloud or through their bond. Part of her wants to close it off — is it not enough that she's here? not enough that Leia, that anyone else isn't? The other part of her, the part that she tries to breathe deep and centre herself on, thinks that the least she can do is leave that connection open, let the emotions and lives and deaths of the galaxy flood through her.

At least then she knows it matters that she's gone.

"Can you feel her?" Ben asks once they've made a fire, the first thing he's said since she realised what being on Ahch-To truly meant. "My — the General?"

Rey almost says _no_ , the old spite still lingering bitter at the back of her tongue. But she _can_ feel Leia, right now a bright spark of something truly happy, and the first time she'd been curious about the cause of that happiness and sunk deep enough into the Force to see, she'd seen more of Leia — and of her Vice-Admiral — than she'd ever wanted to see. "Try it yourself," she says, hiding a smirk behind her canteen.

She doesn't actually think he's brave enough to try, but in the firelight his face goes soft and surprised — _is that what he always looked like when he sensed me_? she wonders — before clearing into something more closely resembling horror.

"You _knew_ ," he hisses, blushing furiously, and Rey can't help but laugh.

The moment of levity is too brief though, the reminder that Leia is happy _now_ too fleeting in a galaxy that's passing the two of them by more quickly by the hour. The Resistance is a resistance still, the First Order dwindling too slowly.

And yet when Luke finds them in the morning, waiting patiently by the remnants of their fire, Rey is sleeping with her head on Ben's shoulder.

Rey wakes first, half-consciously shifting to put herself between him and Ben. "You've been gone a long time," she says, voice sleep-rough with accusation.

"I didn't know, when I first came here." He still looks so young, she thinks. Everything and nothing like a man who could fail Ben. Could make him think he had to ...

"But you stayed." Ben shifts in his sleep behind her, and she places a calming hand on his hip.

"Well. It was time for the Jedi —"  He deflates, and for a moment, Rey can see that maybe he wasn't so untouched by the years outside the island. "Why did you come?"

He must know, she thinks, but even as she tries to find the words she knows that something in the Force has gone ... _sideways_ around him. "Your sister sent me." She hesitates, turns around to see Ben's eyes open. "Sent us."

 _Let that be enough_ , she wills him, fingers digging deeper into Ben's hip. _Let me go back_.

Rey can feel Ben's anxious anticipation, mixed with a dread so deep it probably isn't _dread_ at all anymore. She can't feel Luke. Outside, elsewhere, she can feel _hope_.

Luke won't look at either of them, his gaze instead cast out across the sea, but when he nods, it feels like a victory.

(It feels hollow, and aged.)


	2. [ii.] days become minutes

Rey doesn't, strictly, mean to eavesdrop.

But her senses are still Jakku-sharp, hardly a week away from a planet where being able to hear the slightest shift of sand meant the difference between life and death, and it's too easy to hear her name in an unfamiliar, questioning tone.

Rey flattens herself against the wall next to the conference room, trying to keep her breathing steady and quiet as possible. "...find your brother?" The same new voice is saying. It's no one Rey recognises, she's sure of this now.

"She will, Amilyn." It isn't General Organa's _general_ voice, this is something softer and more fond and for a moment Rey wonders if she should feel bad for listening in. But they're talking about her. "Can't you tell? With all of your non-Force —"

"— non-Force witchy star shit," the women finish the sentence together on a laugh, and now Rey _is_ starting to feel a little bit guilty. Maybe the conversation will move on soon, and she can slip past the mostly-open door and back to her quarters and General Organa will never know that she was eavesdropping on her and her friend.

There's quiet from the room, broken only by the soft rustling of cloth, and then General Organa sighs. Rey gives into temptation at that, sidles forward enough that she can see through the gap between the door and the wall. She tells herself it's only curiosity, understandable curiosity because they had been talking about _her_ , and tries to ignore the frantic murmur of _must know, must know, must know_  from the Jakku camps.

General Organa's standing in front of a holomap projected from the large conference table, head slightly bowed. Behind her stands a taller woman with a riot of purple curls, arms around the General's waist and her head tucked into the crook of her neck.

They're clearly entirely absorbed in each other, and Rey lets out a silent breath of relief. They won't notice her slide past, and she'll go to sleep with General Organa's belief in her and her mission warm in her chest.

But as soon as she's decided to move, she's stopped again. "It's Ahch-To, Leia," the purple-haired woman — _Amilyn_ , the General had said — murmurs, and Rey has to strain to hear the words, muffled as they are by the General's vest. "Who knows when she'll be back?"

General Organa sighs, seeming to sink into Amilyn with an affection Rey had rarely seen between the few couples that tried to make a life together on Jakku. "There's time enough," she says. "Luke's been there for six years, and I can still feel him, sometimes ... I can feel him, him and the monstrous loneliness of the island ..."

She should look away, she _knows_ , cheeks burning with the knowledge that this is a side of the General that she has no right to, and no right to jealousy over, even as the memory of Leia's solid warmth in her arms on the tarmac a week ago comes flooding back.

When Amilyn says, "Not tonight, Leia, not alone," turns her in her arms and bends down to kiss her gently, Rey leaves, as silently and quickly as she can.

She buckles herself into the Falcon the next morning with shaking fingers, despite the General's belief. Luke is on an island, and the island will be green, and there are always monsters in the green.

Monsters with the face of Ben Solo.

But for all her fears, Rey meets no monsters on Ahch-To her first day there, or her second. None beyond the island itself, and the way land meets sea meets sky in shades of green and blue that curve up and around her like the sand never did.

So much green, and so little space.

There is too little space to be lonely, even if she _couldn't_ feel Luke somewhere on the island with her. It's an inconstant flicker of a presence in the Force, like something trying to stay hidden but too old to care, and she remembers General Organa saying: _sometimes_. Sometimes there is Luke, more recognisable by the empty shape he's carved out of the Force than anything else.

He's better hidden physically, though, amid rocks and ruins and damp muddy ground like fists around her ankles every time she lifts her foot to take a step. It's exhausting, and after two days of walking she still feels as if she's seen none of the island.

None of the _real_ island.

Nights, Rey dreams of falling through Ahch-To's surface, earth and water and rocks smooth like mirrored glass, and watches herself slip through Leia and Ben's outstretched hands like so much sand.

"Do you think Luke's even here?" She asks Chewie on the morning of the third day, when every part of her physical form aches from the damp and everything else aches with the _pull_ of the Force, somehow even more insistent when she's awake.

He doesn't look away from trying to catch one of the porgs for long enough to do more than grumble something about the Force-users' meanings of _here_ , but it's enough to give her an idea.

She follows the thread of absence that day, walks along the beach where sea meets land and stretches her arms out until she can almost _feel_ her fingers running along the seams in the Force where life meets death and death meets new life. She sees parts of the island she's never seen before, even when she doubles back on yesterdays paths.

Rey feels as though something has fallen away. She feels as though something has pulled her down, closer to the paths she needs. She hardly feels closer to Luke.

That night she dreams only of Leia — always _Leia_ in the dreams, when the Resistance falls away and only the Force stands between them.

 _You're not alone, Rey_ , dream-Leia whispers as she kneels by Rey's side and cards her hands through her hair, and although Amilyn's dream-shape is next to her, one arm wrapped around her waist and the other resting on Rey's knee, she knows Leia isn't talking about her.

 _Bring him home, Rey_ , dream-Amilyn says, and there is such a weight to _home_  that Rey knows she isn't talking about Luke, either.

That day, Rey climbs to the highest peak she can find, runs through old training forms with the lightsabre that she doesn't want to admit is becoming hers until she can no longer stand. Watches birds streak the starry sky like TIE fighters and screams until she can't see anything but the cool black of her first dreamless sleep since arriving on Ahch-To.

Ben is sitting by her fire when she wakes.

"You know, your mother stays in my dreams," she says, fingers clenching just a little tighter in her blankets.

Something that might have been regret flickers across his face. "She's untrained. But she knew you were calling for me."

"Liar," she says, but her voice is still hoarse with the memory of yesterday's screams and she doesn't know how many of those might have been a name.

"You feel it, don't you?" he continues, unconcerned. "You know how to find Skywalker, now. He's right where he left himself the night he nearly killed me. Right where he's spent every day of this planet, every minute of the rest of the galaxy."

"Nearly killed —" Rey struggles to sit up, shivering in the morning's chill. "He wouldn't."

Ben's smile is sad, and nothing like Kylo. "There's a lot of things I thought I wouldn't do. Don't you remember how quickly things change when you're on your own, Rey?"

He's never said her name before. Among all the spinning thoughts, that one stands out, and when he leans forward, stretches his hand out across the dead remnants of her fire, it gives the gesture such weight that she screams again, screams louder as the ground cracks between them just as it did in the forest.

 _Jump, Rey_ , his voice echoes in and around her, and this, yes, _this_ it is easy to listen to.

Rey jumps, and Rey falls, and when Rey hits the water there's a blinding flash of pain so wholly consuming it feels like peace.

She comes to in a cave like glass, water saturating her clothes and skin and hair and her reflection peering back at her from every angle. It's dizzying, even more than Ben's words, and her head throbs as she tries to sit up for the second time in —

— in ten minutes? How long had she floated, in the black?

"A day," a voice says from behind her, and Rey rolls over in shock, fumbling for her 'sabre.

In the corner of the cave, bent and wizened and not reflected even once, sits Luke Skywalker, lightsabre in hand. Relief wars with confusion as she tries to find words for him — surely six year couldn't have aged him this much?

_Who knows when she'll be back._

_Every day of this planet, every minute of the rest of the galaxy._

What she finally says is, "You've waited too long, Master Skywalker."

"Waited?" he laughs. "I wasn't waiting for anything. Been away, perhaps, though I admit I didn't think I'd see the day one of you younglings would jump straight for the dark like this."

"That's not why —" she starts, but he cuts her off with nothing more than a raised hand. She sighs, tries again. "Kylo — Ben said that you tried —"

"Considered," he says, but it's a correction, not a denial. "Why do you think I haven't left?"

Rey looks at the lightsabre in his hand, tries to judge how quickly she could grab it. She's fought bigger men for less, but this is _Luke Skywalker_ , and he is nothing like what he is supposed to be. Fighting him would be nothing like what it would supposed to be.

Luke chuckles. "She resists," he wheezes, and one, ten, a hundred, a thousand Reys around them bring hands clasped around a 'sabre hilt to their chests, plant their left feet against their right knees as the lightsabres ignite as beacons of purple stretching up to the nonexistent sky.

Rey looks between herselves and Luke, feels her breath coming shorter and shorter in the confined cave. "What are you —"

"Not me," he shakes his head. "Haven't you known? You're not alone, Rey."

 _Rey, Rey, Rey_ , a hundred thousand echoes of water on stone.

When he flips the lightsabre to her, she catches it more by instinct than anything else. "You should go," he says, and he sounds kind for the first time. _Feels_ kind, in the Force, for the first time. "Leia's waiting. My nephew ... he's waiting, too."

The 'sabre in Rey's hand ignites on it's own, _blue, blue_ as she turns away from Luke Skywalker.


	3. [iii.] days become hours

When Rey at long last finds Kylo Ren again, it is she who is the hunter.

Kylo is a pathetic excuse for prey, though, curled on a blanket beside a fire long since burned to embers. Her hand is loosely curled around her saber hilt, but the steadiness of her breathing indicates either sleep or a meditation much deeper than Rey believes her capable of.

In a way, it's a relief - she's been alone on Ahch-To for days, hopping through the archipelago with a speed that makes the Falcon complain it wasn't meant for such short haul flights, chasing the void in the Force that Luke Skywalker has become.

But seeing Kylo like this, almost small in sleep though she towers over Rey in their waking hours, feels wrong.

Her presence on the island is wrong, and Rey's gripped with a sudden fear for Leia and Finn and the others left behind. If Kylo was here, then the First Order was ...

Rey takes a deep breath, feels the unnatural warmth of her own sabre hilt under her palm. She could kill her now. She could protect Luke, avenge Han, give Leia peace, free Kylo from the anguish that never once left her eyes, only twisted itself into new forms depending on who it was directed at.

She can't. She can't give Kylo that sort of peace, not now that she's seen her face.

Instead she sits down on the other side of the fire, as near to Kylo as she can be without being in immediate range of her lightsabre. Reaches out with the Force, and nudges her awake.

Kylo leaps to her feet with a snarl and a cry, dropping her sabre in surprise before calling it back before it can hit the ground and igniting it. Behind the blinding red beam her hair and cloak are flying, Kylo's own personal storm made manifest. The scar running nearly from forehead to chin stands out in the light, as if it had never stopped bleeding.

Rey thinks, in a sudden, blinding moment of clarity, that she's never seen anyone look more beautiful.

"What are you doing here?" Kylo demands. Her desperation is nearly a physical thing in the air between them. "You left. Why didn't you ... why didn't you just leave?"

The blade is shaking in her hand. Rey resists the urge to reach for her own sabre, knows she can't fight Kylo like that again. "I made promises," she says, and hopes Kylo doesn't ask, _to who_?

She's not sure what she promised Kylo. She is sure that Ahch-To will wring the knowing of it from her bones, feed it to Kylo without asking what either of them want.

Such, it seems, is the way of the Force.

"He won't save you. Luke."

She doesn't ask how Kylo knows. It is, if anything, one of the least strange things about this conversation. "The galaxy believes in him. Maybe that's all it needs."

"Foolish girl," Kylo spits in contempt. Rey holds her ground. "There was dark in you before I ever touched you. He'll try to cut it out of you just like he did with me, and you'll be sent running off crying."

"Into your arms like a fainting maiden from legend?" Rey asks, but her voice is shaking as badly as Kylo's hand, and what she really wants to ask is, _what did he do to you_?

"It's better than where I ran," Kylo says, and lowers her sabre. She's still beautiful in the light, but now Rey sees a terrifying kindness there as well. "Please, Rey. I don't want you to have to go through that too."

Rey believes her, beyond all reason. Believes that Kylo believes, at any rate, and that's ...

It shouldn't be enough, not set against everything she's heard about Luke Skywalker and everything she's seen Kylo do, but it is and she's not even scared of that belief. "But you did run," she says, and it's as if the words are coming from very far away. "And your mothers - your father - everyone on Hosnian Prime, Breha, it was you too."

Only then does Kylo falter, the angry blade going dim with her shock. "My mothers are alive. I had nothing to do with Hosnian Prime. And you didn't know my _father_."

The last word is a curse in her mouth, and Rey suddenly thinks she knows why Kylo is here, on the same verdant rock her uncle chose for exile.

"I knew he was kind," she says; _like you_ , unspoken. "Did you follow me here, or did I follow you?"

Kylo's saber finally dies, and she slumps to the ground. Rey doesn't need the extra light from the saber to know that there are tears in her eyes. "You can spend a day on this planet while the galaxy sees only an hour. I needed to ... to think. And before you ask, no, I haven't seen my uncle, much less killed him as you're doubtlessly worrying."

"I wasn't," Rey says, and it's the closest thing to a lie she's told all day.

Kylo lets it go, but she bites her lip in a way that makes Rey suspect she knows she's lying. "Neither of us need to follow the other," she says. "We're connected. I knew it from the moment I set eyes on you, or maybe before. I thought we might find answers here."

"Have you found anything useful yet?" It comes out harsher than she'd intended.

"No," Kylo says simply. "But you found me. I think that's enough to start with. We have all the time in all the worlds here."

Rey frowns. She's not sure she likes the idea of that, of a time just as impossibly capricious as the Force. She's not sure she likes the idea of spending any of that time with Kylo.

But there's no denying the sharp tug in her belly and at the base of her skull when she sees Kylo.

There's no denying the fact that when she reaches out a hand in silent apology, Kylo takes it.


End file.
